Rich Parsons

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Richard Parsons is Vice Chair and co-founder of the Suburban Maryland Transportation Alliance, and Managing Partner of ProActive Community Strategies, LLC, a public affairs consulting firm in Rockville, Maryland. He is a former presidential campaign staffer, Legislative Director on Capitol Hill, and an experienced national and state government affairs specialist. He was part of the lobbying team that passed the Brady Bill in Congress, and dozens of other state and local public safety, transportation and economic initiatives in over two dozen states. He moved to Maryland in 1994, where he served as Executive Director of the Maryland Democratic Party, Maryland government affairs director for the Greater Washington Board of Trade, President and CEO of the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce, and Chief Operating Officer of Rodgers Consulting, a $15 million-dollar land-use planning and civil engineering firm in Germantown. He has worked on several major transportation initiatives in Maryland (the Corridor Cities Transitway, Purple Line, Woodrow Wilson Bridge, Metro Funding, Montrose Parkway and the Intercounty Connector), and is an outspoken advocate for increased transportation investment. He has served on numerous boards and commissions, including the Montgomery County Planning Board’s 2001 Transportation Policy Report Task Force, Rebuilding Together and Committee for Montgomery. He is a graduate of Leadership Montgomery, helped lead a broad-based grassroots effort called “endgridlock.org” that unseated several local officials in the 2002 elections, and was named one of the twelve “People to Watch” by the Washington Business Journal for his leadership on regional transportation issues.